i can’t tell if this is hell on earth or not

Erin Feeley
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Post-ghost tour last night I headed over to my ritual post-ghost tour watering hole, as I ritually do. There was an older woman standing at the bar when I approached it to order my usual Coors Light draft. I read once that a batch of Coors Light laced with cocaine accidentally got out. Hoax or not, I like to hope I’ll get lucky and it will happen (again?).

One of the two bartenders, gesturing to the other, informed this woman “he says you didn’t order anything with him either” and turned to me. This woman, who wasn’t elderly but whose blonde hair had more than started to whiten, first looked embarrassed, then angry, but just said “Oo-kay.”
I asked bartender man for the Coors Light draft. She asked me what a Coors Light raff is.
“Draft”, I told her. For someone that likes to public speak I mumble an awful lot. When he returned with it, she asked him for “a um. Ah, .. a Budweiser! Bottle, please.”
She sidled up in the chair next to mine and asked if I wanted anything to eat. I declined but thanked her anyway. When she was handed her bottle of Bud I opted to cheers her and introduce myself. She seemed offended, like I was humoring her.
“I know,” she said. “We’ve already done this. I know that I know you, I know your face! But I hit my head good a few years back so my short-term memory is shot and I’m no good with names anymore. But like, I know you, obviously, we’re here together aren’t we? Where are we, anyway?”
I told her the name of the bar.
“Where is that?”
“In Boston.”
“Oh, right. Are you hungry?”
“I am not, but thank you.”
She thanked me for buying her the beer that she bought, asked where we were again and excused herself to go to the bathroom. When she returned she was blank-faced and asked if her beer was hers. When I confirmed that it was, she took it, excused herself again, and wandered to a different section of the bar in a daze. I finished my beer and slipped out before she returned, presumably long after, already, that she had forgotten I ever existed.

I can’t stop thinking about her. I wonder if I should not have left her alone in public. But how did she get there? Where did she come from? Who let her out alone in a city? Was she with someone, forgot and wandered off?

What perplexes me the most, though, is whether or not this woman is living in a personal purgatory or not. There was a flash of frustration and fury in her eyes when the bartender told her she hadn’t ordered anything, and when I introduced myself. Is it the most frustrating thing in the world to not remember what happened two minutes prior? Or not, if you forget you were ever frustrated and furious two minutes later?

As my dad likes to say: I can’t remember, I got magnesia

Erin Feeley

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comic & ghost tour guide